Fundamentalists, Liberals -- We're all Postmodernists

Two events in recent weeks have reminded me how thoroughly postmodern our national debate has become. By postmodern, I mean that people do not agree on what sorts of things must be accepted as cold, hard fact. Or, to put it slightly more philosophically, there are no more firm foundations of knowledge. In earlier decades, most people accepted scientific conclusions as fact. Now, people on both the left and right tend to dismiss science that disagrees with their ideology.

An example of the right’s rejection of science can be found here in Georgia. As reported nationally, Cobb County required (the regulation was struck down) its schools’ biology texts to bear a sticker stating that evolution is a "theory, not a fact." Technically, of course, this is true. But evolution has such overwhelming support among scientists – and even among conservative ideologues like Bill O’Reilly – that it should be considered to be in the same category as "theories" about gravity and relativity.

Right now, liberals may be nodding their heads, agreeing that this is precisely the sort of thing we should expect from delusional, irrational fundamentalists. But we’re not totally different. In another widely reported story, Harvard president Lawrence Summers suggested at a private conference three reasons why top universities have so few women on their math and science faculties. The first two reasons – discrimination and pressures to begin a family during prime working years – were not terribly controversial. The third option he suggested – innate differences between the male and female brain – prompted at least one female scientist to walk out of his lecture and made Summers the subject of widespread ridicule.

Was the ridicule justified? Yes – because of his position, Summers dealt a blow to the credibility of female scientists, even if that was not his intention. Still, researchers have found a host of differences (beyond the obvious) between men and women. According to The New York Times ("Gray Matter and the Sexes: Still a Scientific Gray Matter" – I’d link you, but now you’d have to pay for the story), men and women differ in terms of the architecture of their brains, their average scores on quantitative tests, and even the way they metabolize medicines affecting the brain. The research does NOT prove that men are "better" at math and science then women. (This male struggles to add without a calculator). It does, however, suggest that there are real differences meriting further research.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that scientists did find evidence that men were better than women at math. Or that women were better than men at languages. Could liberals accept scientifically proven, aptitudinal differences between the sexes any more than fundamentalists can accept evolutionary science? Or would our commitment to an unnunaced equality trump the research?

Of course, we should be skeptical of any study that claims that women or minorities are genetically less capable of doing anything. Most of the time, such studies involve subtle bias – and biased "racial science" has been used to justify oppression for hundreds of years. Until we start seeing studies revealing that white men (like me) are naturally "bad" at something, we should be suspicious that prejudice is hiding behind the scientific method.

Still, it’s interesting that Summers’ opponents often skipped the science and went straight to angry rhetoric. Given our history of discrimination, it's understandable. But the righteous indignation present in the responses suggests that liberals take total equivalence between the sexes as a sacred article of faith. That belief – central to who we are and what we believe – will tend to discredit any science to the contrary, a bit like belief in creation trumps proofs of evolution. I'm not saying that evolution and theories of gender difference have equal scientific backing -- they don't -- just that we are all suspicious of science that interferes with what we already believe.

Maybe science will show we need a more nuanced notion of equality. Maybe men and women DO tend to assess problems differently. That doesn’t mean that one gender is better at science than another, but it may mean we solve problems in different ways. Must equality mean that men and women are exactly the same, that we function in exactly the same way? If it "must" mean that -- or else the researchers are misogynists! -- then we share something in common with the fundamentalists.

Like it or not, we’re all post-modernists here.